Red Sprites and Blue Jets

This is primarily a description of the Univ. Alaska research into
middle and upper atmospheric optical and electrical phenomena. I have
recently (May 12, 2004) begun to update the descriptions on this web
page. Please email me with
any corrections, additions, or suggestions

Since then, video sequences of well over a thousand sprites have been
captured. These include measurements from the ground
(
Lyons, 1994; Winckler, 1995)
and from aircraft (Sentman and Wescott, 1993;
Sentman et al., 1995).

Numerous images have also been obtained from aircraft of blue jets (
Wescott et al., 1995),
also a
previously unrecorded form of optical activity above thunderstorms.
Blue jets appear to emerge directly from the tops of
clouds and shoot upward in narrow cones through the stratosphere.
Their upward speed has been measured to be about 100 km per second.

Anecdotal reports of "rocket-like" and other optical emissions above
thunderstorms go back more than a century (Lyons, 1994), and there
have been several pilot reports of similar phenomena (Vaughan and
Vonnegut, 1989). Possibly associated gamma ray bursts and TIPPS have
also recently reported. Together, these phenomena suggest that
thunderstorms exert a much greater influence on the middle and upper
atmospheres than was previously suspected.

Early research reports for these events referred to them by a variety
of names, including
"upward lightning," "upward discharges,"
"cloud-to-stratosphere discharges," and "cloud-to-ionosphere
discharges." Now they are simply referred to as sprites, a whimsical
term that evokes a sense of their fleeting nature, while at the same
time remaining
nonjudgemental about physical processes that have yet to be determined.